No Distance from Justice

Bangladesh has become remarkably efficient at receiving money from citizens who are not physically present. In FY2025-26, workers’ remittances reached about $35.59 billion, up from $30.33 billion a year earlier; in FY2023-24 the figure was $23.91 billion, according to Bangladesh Bank. The banking system can channel earnings across borders electronically and turn them into family expenses, savings or property at home. Yet when those same earnings become the subject of a dispute, distance suddenly matters again. On 13 October, the law minister said the government was drafting a proposal for specialised courts or tribunals to deal with legal disputes involving expatriate Bangladeshis, including conflicts over property bought with overseas earnings and money sent to relatives. The proposal is important, but the strongest case for it is not that expatriates send billions of dollars home. Remittance should not become the price of legal attention. The deeper issue is whether citizenship remains equally usable when the citizen lives thousands of kilometres away. Bangladesh has built sophisticated channels for money to travel home. The harder institutional test is whether legal protection can travel back across the same distance.

Living abroad does not prevent an expatriate Bangladeshi from becoming a party to a property or financial dispute at home; the difficulty often lies in pursuing that dispute across distance. A case may require lawyers, documents, witnesses, notices and repeated communication with courts. If physical attendance becomes necessary, every step can carry the added cost of airfare, leave from work and uncertainty about how long the process will take. This is why a specialised forum should be judged by more than the number of cases it can dispose of quickly. The design has to take distance seriously. Clear jurisdiction would tell expatriates which disputes qualify. Predictable scheduling would reduce unnecessary travel. Secure electronic communication could make notices and case updates easier to follow. Remote participation, where the law permits it, could remove the need to cross continents for a procedural appearance. None of this would make expatriates more deserving than citizens who live in Bangladesh. It would recognise a simple fact about equal access: the same procedure can impose radically different burdens on two people when one lives near the courthouse and the other lives six thousand kilometres away.

Bangladesh does not need to invent this legal architecture from nothing. The Courts’ Use of Information Technology Act, 2020 already authorises courts, subject to Supreme Court practice directions, to use audio-video or other electronic methods for trials, inquiries, hearings, evidence-taking, arguments, orders and judgments. The Commercial Court Act, 2026 goes further within its own jurisdiction, allowing virtual hearings and, where the required infrastructure and practice directions are in place, the use of information technology for filing cases, issuing summons, submitting documents and delivering judgments. The election system offers another revealing comparison. For the 2026 parliamentary election and referendum, the Election Commission introduced an IT-supported postal-voting system for Bangladeshis abroad. A vote and a lawsuit are obviously different institutions, but the comparison matters. Bangladesh has already accepted the principle that physical absence need not mean civic absence. A future expatriate tribunal should build on that principle rather than simply creating another courtroom that remains difficult to reach from abroad.

Other labour-sending countries have approached the same problem from a different direction. The Philippines’ Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995 created a Legal Assistant for Migrant Workers Affairs, authorised that office to hire domestic or foreign private lawyers, and established a 100-million-peso Legal Assistance Fund. The fund may cover foreign-lawyer fees, bail bonds, court fees and other litigation expenses for eligible migrant workers and overseas Filipinos in distress. The current Department of Migrant Workers’ Citizens Charter also lists counselling, referral, legal-assistance and conciliation-mediation services in recruitment and employment-related matters. If Bangladesh creates such a special mechanism, it should therefore have transparent eligibility, clearly defined jurisdiction and the ordinary safeguards of a fair process. The objective is not to create a privileged class of litigants. It is to stop geography from becoming an unofficial penalty.

The scale of Bangladesh’s overseas connection makes that principle difficult to ignore. Bangladesh Bank data show that in FY2025-26 the largest source of remittances was Saudi Arabia, at about $5.85 billion, followed by the United Kingdom at $5.07 billion and the United Arab Emirates at $4.58 billion. These are financial figures, but the legal relationships behind them continue after the transfer reaches Bangladesh. Citizens abroad may send substantial sums to relatives and purchase property in Bangladesh, the very kinds of transactions the law minister identified as sources of prolonged disputes. The success of any new tribunal should therefore not be measured only by how many new courtrooms are opened or how quickly a case is closed. A better measure is whether an expatriate can protect a lawful interest at home without being forced into an unnecessary choice between pursuing justice and maintaining a livelihood abroad. That standard also avoids the most dangerous argument in this debate: expatriates deserve better justice not because they send money but because legal protection belongs to citizenship itself.
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The writer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at IUBAT and is currently on study leave, residing in Oslo, Norway